Why? Perl 5 is a highly portable, stable and dependable technology, since a very long time. This is the version I use for validating my scripts for backward compatibility. This source tree starts with Perl v5.8.9 (perl-5.8.9.tar.gz) which was released in 2008-12-16, according to [1]. This MUST be used only for development and validation. There is a 'build.sh' script that uses "~/local" as prefix, it will build, test and install there, it is trivial to customize it. See README.orig for the original README. - [1]: https://dev.perl.org/perl5/news/2008/perl-5.8.9.html